Platform Gallery

Most of the time, as soon as I am awake, I begin scrolling through the layers of news on my phone, while still laying in bed. The ISIS updates, the new Ebola cases, and the pithy comments on the latest art world drama barely stick during this first round of skimming headlines and images, my awareness of the day coming into focus as I work through the tweets and the “Likes.” This activity would seem to have little to do with the meticulous, studied ways we usually interact with paintings. However, Brooklyn artist Joy Garnett proves otherwise, as evidenced by her new show, Being There, which opened at Seattle’s Platform Gallery last week. Pulling images from the media—including photographs of conflicts in the Middle East and screen grabs of leaked US military videos—Garnett’s new paintings bleed and blur their scenes into places that seem as familiar as the widely-disseminated photographs they reference. However, the artist also brings out the distant, fleeting way we absorb these images, turning their subjects into things we can never fully know. —Erin Langner, Seattle contributor

“ANYTHING can be ’editioned.’ Repetition is your friend.” This is one of the rules in William Powhida’sThe Rules, which itself an edition of sorts. Referred to by the artist as a “republication,” The Rules is an oil painting that was made by an employee of painting village in Shenzhen, China, based on a JPEG image depicting the Brooklyn artist’s text-based drawing of the same title. This republication is available in three sizes and can be purchased through the artist’s website, for the duration of his show at Platform Gallery, Unretrospective, along with any JPEG that can be found on the site. In effect, Powhida has created a space where anything really can be editioned, and repetition is your—or at least your wallet’s—friend.— Erin Langner, Seattle contributor

William Powhida | WHAT CAN THE Art World TEACH YOU?, 2014 (republication)oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Platform Gallery.

I was not familiar with the term “hobby lantern” prior to seeing Robert Yoder’s (NAP #85) new paintings. It turns out to be a phenomenon of atmospheric, apparition-like lights that appear in boggy conditions, leading travelers astray from the safest path, also known as a will-o’-the-wisp. Appearing in titles of works featured in Dark Entries at Seattle’s Platform Gallery this month, the hobby lantern is a fitting keystone for paintings rich in both the thick, muddiness of their surfaces and the emotional sensibilities that flare beneath. - Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor

Jaq Chartier’s (NAP #13, #31, #61) paintings like to pose as objects other than paintings. The Seattle artist and cofounder of Aqua Art Miami is best known for Testing, an ongoing that physically experiments with her materials and processes. Chartier integrates paint with saturated inks, stains and dyes she designs to evolve over time, creating large, hyper-saturated canvases that pulse with patterns and forms that reference the imagery of contemporary science—DNA strands, glass slides, microbodies— and ultimately behave as visual experiments themselves. - Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor

Artist Robert Yoder’s gallery, known simply as SEASON, resides on a wide thoroughfare between two north Seattle neighborhoods, somewhere between a deli and a city park. One of several residential spaces appearing in disparate corners of the post-recession city as other spaces downsized or faded away, SEASON fills not only a gap in available spaces for artists to show work but also creates a distinct venue for relationships between artists to manifest. - Erin Langner, Seattle Contributor

This is the first in a series of discussions conducted between professionals - gallerists, collectors, curators, artists - who have some kind of connection or partnership that elicits conversation about practice, collaboration, or the business of art. Robert Yoder (NAP #7, #85) is a Seattle-based artist who has shown work internationally and is no stranger to New American Paintings. He runs a gallery called SEASON out of his mid-century home in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle.

The small row of Patte Loper’s modest, handcrafted sculptures from new exhibition Still Point of the Returning World discretely lines a pedestal in the back of Seattle’s Platform Gallery. Untitled (Leipzig) resembles an awkward architectural model of stacked boxes, covered by a bulbous sheet; the nearby funnel created from sticks and cardboard strips stands stagnant in space, like a film prop without a set. Within the surrounding paintings, however, these foreign sculptural objects explode into complex cornerstones of the artist’s fantastical, painted environments.

Prole Drift stands within an older mixed-use building, angled between the top and bottom of a steep hill in Seattle’s International District. Much in the same way its name references a connection between the upper and the working classes, Dirk Park’s new venue inhabits a space of intersection somewhere between a traditional gallery, a studio and an open place for artistic experimentation.